Blair to meet China's enigmatic Mr Hu

Hu Jintao, China's 58-year-old Vice-President, arrived in Moscow yesterday on his first visit to Russia, and immediately went into talks with President Vladimir Putin. Today he lands in London, the first time he has been anywhere in western Europe. Nor has he ever visited the United States.

The enigmatic Mr Hu is aptly named. Even in China he is a mystery. Yet Tony Blair and other world leaders are eager to meet him because within a year he will be the ruler of a fifth of mankind.

In Chinese leadership terms Mr Hu is still a young man, but in 2002 he will take over the ruling Communist Party, which has 65 million members in a nation of 1.3 billion people. Mr Blair, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and a clutch of British business leaders will have a rare opportunity to take a close look at the former hydroelectric engineer whose official biography reveals only a penchant for table-tennis and dancing.

Dubbed the "core in waiting" of China's "fourth generation" leadership, Mr Hu certainly holds all the cards to succeed boss Jiang Zemin, the "core of the third generation", following Deng Xiaoping and Mao Tse-tung, at next autumn's party congress. When Mr Jiang's term as president ends in 2003, he is expected to take over that title as well.

"Hu is very bright, very smooth and focused, very much a man in control of himself," recalled a European diplomat in Beijing who met him this year, and testified to his photographic memory. "For half an hour he recited trade and investment figures, all without notes, but we got no impression of the whole man. When we later met [Hu's rival] Vice-Premier Wen Jiabao, he was lively, chatty and strayed from his brief."

Such amiable qualities pale against Mr Hu's meteoric rise and steadfast loyalty. He never put a foot wrong, and proved his mettle during tough postings in Tibet and other parts of western China. His Tibetan years will dog him on this trip, however, as activists protest his hardline reign and call for Beijing to open negotiations with the exiled Dalai Lama.

"It would reflect well on Tony Blair at this time to demonstrate a commitment to pursuing peaceful solutions to global problems, such as the occupation of Tibet," said Alison Reynolds of the Free Tibet Campaign in London.

Although the ongoing war on terrorism may force Mr Hu into agreements to co-operate, he is here to pursue the Sino-British business relationship.

Above all, his visit to Britain, then France, Spain and Germany, enables him to pose with world leaders for pictures that will be widely publicised back home. "Foreigners might regard him as an inward-thinking bureaucrat, instead of an outward-looking statesman," said a political commentator in Beijing. "This trip is a prelude leading him to the centre of the stage." As he enters the most public phase of his grooming process the world, but especially China, awaits his reaction to the spotlight.